CHAPTER XV

JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM HUMAN LIFE

Romans vi. 14—vii. 6

AT the point we have now reached, the Apostle's
thought pauses for a moment, to resume.9494It will be observed that we place the paragraph after ver. 13, not,
as many editions of the Epistle do, after ver. 14. It seems to us clear
that ver. 14 has a closer connexion with the following than with the
previous context. It looks back, not precisely to ver. 13, but to the
general recent argument, that it may then look definitely forward, over
new ground.
He has brought us to self-surrender. We have seen the
sacred obligations of our divine and wonderful liberty.
We have had the miserable question, "Shall we cling
to sin?" answered by an explanation of the rightness
and the bliss of giving over our accepted persons, in
the fullest liberty of will, to God, in Christ. Now
he pauses, to illustrate and enforce. And two human
relations present themselves for the purpose; the one
to shew the absoluteness of the surrender, the other
its living results. The first is Slavery, the second is
Wedlock.

For sin shall not have dominion over you; sin
shall not put in its claim upon you, the claim
which the Lord has met in your Justification; for you are
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not brought9595Ὑπὸ νόμον, ὑπὸ χάριν:
the accusative case gives the preposition properly the meaning of
motion underwards. But this must not be pressed too far.
under law, but under grace. The whole
previous argument explains this sentence. He refers to
our acceptance. He goes back to the justification of
the guilty, "without the deeds of law," by the act of
free grace; and briefly restates it thus, that he may take
up afresh the position that this glorious liberation means
not licence but divine order. Sin shall be no more your
tyrant-creditor, holding up the broken law in evidence
that it has right to lead you off to a pestilential prison,
and to death. Your dying Saviour has met your creditor
in full for you, and in Him you have entire discharge in
that eternal court where the terrible plea once stood
against you. Your dealings as debtors are now not with
the enemy who cried for your death, but with the Friend
who has bought you out of his power.

What then? are we to sin, because we are not
brought under law, but under grace? Shall our life
be a life of licence, because we are thus wonderfully free?
The question assuredly is one which, like that of ver. 1,
and like those suggested in iii. 8, 31, had often been
asked of St Paul, by the bitter opponent, or by the false
follower. And again it illustrates and defines, by the
direction of its error, the line of truth from which it flew
off. It helps to do what we remarked above,9696p. 157.
to assure us that when St Paul taught "Justification by faith,
without deeds of law," he meant what he said, without
reserve; he taught that great side of truth wholly, and
without a compromise. He called the sinner, "just as he
was, and waiting not to rid his soul of one dark blot," to
receive at once, and without fee, the acceptance of God
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for Another's blessed sake. Bitter must have been the
moral pain of seeing, from the first, this holy freedom
distorted into an unhallowed leave to sin.9797Luther's Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter, has been often quoted as if
that great saint meant to argue licence from Justification by faith. "God
forbid." The words occur in a counsel to Melanchthon, whose anxious
conscience doubted whether it were not a sin to communicate in one
Kind, even where the true Rite in both Kinds could not be had. It
was Luther's glowing paradox, to drive a manifestly morbid and
weakening scrupulousness from his friend's mind. See Julius Hare's
Vindication of Luther, pp. 178, etc.
But he will not meet it by an impatient compromise, or untimely confusion.
It shall be answered by a fresh collocation; the
liberty shall be seen in its relation to the Liberator; and
behold, the perfect freedom is a perfect service, willing
but absolute, a slavery joyfully accepted, with open eyes
and open heart, and then lived out as the most real of
obligations by a being who has entirely seen that he is
not his own.

Away with the thought. Do you not know that
the party to whom you present, surrender, yourselves
bondservants, slaves, so as to obey him,—bondservants
you are, not the less for the freewill of the
surrender, of the party whom you obey; no longer
merely contractors with him, who may bargain, or retire,
but his bondservants out and out; whether of sin, to
death, or of obedience, to righteousness? (As if their
assent (ὑπακοὴ) to Christ, their Amen to His terms of
peace, acceptance, righteousness, were personified; they
were now the bondsmen of this their own act and deed,
which had put them, as it were, into Christ's hands for
all things.) Now (δὲ) thanks be to
our (τῷ) God,
that you were bondmen of sin, in legal claim, and
under moral sway; yes, every one of you was this, whatever
forms the bondage took upon its surface; but you
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obeyed from the heart the mould of teaching to which
you were handed over.9898So undoubtedly the Greek must be rendered.
They had been sin's slaves.
Verbally, not really, he "thanks God" for that fact of
the past. Really, not verbally, he "thanks God" for the
pastness of the fact, and for the bright contrast to it in
the regenerated present. They had now been "handed
over," by their Lord's transaction about them, to another
ownership, and they had accepted the transfer, "from the
heart." It was done by Another for them, but they had
said their humble, thankful fiat as He did it. And
what was the new ownership thus accepted? We
shall find soon (ver. 22), as we might expect, that it
is the mastery of God. But the bold, vivid introductory
imagery has already called it (ver. 16) the
slavery of "Obedience." Just below (vers. 19, 20)
it is the slavery of "Righteousness," that is, if we
read the word aright in its whole context, of "the
Righteousness of God," His acceptance of the sinner
as His own in Christ. And here, in a phrase most
unlikely of all, whose personification strikes life
into the most abstract aspects of the message of the
grace of God, the believer is one who has been transferred
to the possession of "a mould of Teaching."
The apostolic Doctrine, the mighty Message, the living
Creed of life, the Teaching of the acceptance of the
guilty for the sake of Him who was their Sacrifice, and
is now their Peace and Life—this truth has, as it were,
grasped them as its vassals, to form them, to mould
them, for its issues. It is indeed their "tenet." It holds
them; a thought far different from what is too often
meant when we say of a doctrine that "we hold it."
Justification by their Lord's merit, union with their
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Lord's life; this was a doctrine, reasoned, ordered,
verified. But it was a doctrine warm and tenacious
with the love of the Father and of the Son. And it
had laid hold of them with a mastery which swayed
thought, affection, and will; ruling their whole view of
self and of God.
Now (δὲ),
liberated from your (τῆς)
sin, you were enslaved to the Righteousness of God.9999See above, p. 173.
Here is the point of the argument. It is
a point of steel, for all is fact; but the steel is steeped
in love, and carries life and joy into the heart it penetrates.
They are not for one moment their own. Their
acceptance has magnificently emancipated them from
their tyrant-enemy. But it has absolutely bound them
to their Friend and King. Their glad consent to be
accepted has carried with it a consent to belong. And
if that consent was at the moment rather implied than
explicit, virtual rather than articulately conscious, they
have now only to understand their blessed slavery better
to give the more joyful thanksgivings to Him who has
thus claimed them altogether as His own.

The Apostle's aim in this whole passage is to awaken
them, with the strong, tender touch of his holy reasoning,
to articulate their position to themselves. They have
trusted Christ, and are in Him. Then, they have
entrusted themselves altogether to Him. Then, they
have, in effect, surrendered. They have consented to
be His property. They are the bondservants, they are the slaves,100100We do not forget that many Christians feel a strong repugnance
to the use of this word, steeped as it is in associations of degradation
and wrong. For ourselves, we would yield to this feeling so far as
habitually to prefer the word of milder sound, "bondservant." But
surely in this passage the Apostle on purpose so accentuates the
thought of our bondservice that its fullest and sternest designation is
in place. And, if in any degree we gather the thought of other hearts
from our own, there are times and connexions in which the fulness of
the joy of service demands that designation in order to its adequate
realization.
of His Truth, that is, of Him robed and
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revealed in His Truth, and shining through it on them
in the glory at once of His grace and of His claim.
Nothing less than such an obligation is the fact for
them. Let them feel, let them weigh, and then let
them embrace, the chain which after all will only prove
their pledge of rest and freedom.

What St Paul thus did for our elder brethren at Rome,
let him do for us of this later time. For us, who read
this page, all the facts are true in Christ to-day. To-day
let us define and affirm their issues to ourselves, and
recollect our holy bondage, and realize it, and live it
out with joy.

Now he follows up the thought. Conscious of the
superficial repulsiveness of the metaphor—quite as
repulsive in itself to the Pharisee as to the Englishman—he
as it were apologizes for it; not the less carefully,
in his noble considerateness, because so many of his
first readers were actually slaves. He does not lightly
go for his picture of our Master's hold of us to the
market of Corinth, or of Rome, where men and women
were sold and bought to belong as absolutely to their
buyers as cattle, or as furniture. Yet he does go there,
to shake slow perceptions into consciousness, and bring
the will face to face with the claim of God. So he
proceeds:
I speak humanly, I use the terms of
this utterly not-divine bond of man to man, to
illustrate man's glorious bond to God, because of the
weakness of your flesh, because your yet imperfect state
enfeebles your spiritual perception, and demands a
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harsh paradox to direct and fix it. For—here is what
he means by "humanly"—just as you surrendered your limbs,101101Μέλη: what "the body" is in such passages as xii. 1 that "the
limbs" are in detail.
your functions and faculties in human life, slaves
to your (τῇ) impurity and to your
(τῇ) lawlessness, unto that
(τὴν)
lawlessness, so that the bad principle did indeed
come out in bad practice, so now, with as little reserve
of liberty, surrender your limbs slaves to righteousness,
to God's Righteousness, to your justifying God, unto
sanctification—so that the surrender shall come out
in your Master's sovereign separation of His purchased
property from sin.

He has appealed to the moral reason of the regenerate
soul. Now he speaks straight to the will. You are,
with infinite rightfulness, the bondmen of your God.
You see your deed of purchase; it is the other side of
your warrant of emancipation. Take it, and write your
own unworthy names with joy upon it, consenting and
assenting to your Owner's perfect rights. And then
live out your life, keeping the autograph of your own
surrender before your eyes. Live, suffer, conquer,
labour, serve, as men who have themselves walked to
their Master's door, and presented the ear to the awl
which pins it to the doorway, each in his turn saying,
"I will not go out free."102102Exod. xxi. 5, 6; Deut. xv. 16, 17.

To such an act of the soul the Apostle calls these
saints, whether they had done the like before or no.
They were to sum up the perpetual fact, then and there,
into a definite and critical act
(παραστήσατε, aorist) of
thankful will. And he calls us to do the same to-day.
By the grace of God, it shall be done. With eyes open,
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and fixed upon the face of the Master who claims us,
and with hands placed helpless and willing within His
hands, we will, we do, present ourselves bondservants
to Him; for discipline, for servitude, for all His will.

For when you were slaves of your (τῆς) sin,
you were freemen as to righteousness, God's Righteousness
(τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ). It had nothing to do
with you, whether to give you peace or to receive your
tribute of love and loyalty in reply. Practically, Christ
was not your Atonement, and so not your Master; you
stood, in a dismal independence, outside His claims. To
you, your lips were your own; your time was your own;
your will was your own. You belonged to self; that is
to say, you were the slaves of your sin. Will you go
back? Will the word "freedom" (he plays with it, as
it were, to prove them) make you wish yourselves back
where you were before you had endorsed by faith your
purchase by the blood of Christ? Nay, for what was
that "freedom," seen in its results, its results upon
yourselves? What fruit, therefore, (the "therefore"
of the logic of facts,) used you to have
then, in those old days, from things over which you are
ashamed now? Ashamed indeed; for the end, the issue,
as the fruit is the tree's "end," the end of those things
is—death; perdition of all true life, here and hereafter
too. But now, in the blessed actual state of
your case, as by faith you have entered into
Christ, into His work and into His life, now liberated
from sin and enslaved to God, you have your fruit, you
possess indeed, at last, the true issues of being for
which you were made, all contributing to sanctification,
to that separation to God's will in practice which is the
development of your separation to that will in critical
fact, when you met your Redeemer in self-renouncing
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faith. Yes, this fruit you have indeed; and as its end,
as that for which it is produced, to which it always and
for ever tends, you have life eternal. For the
pay of sin, sin's military stipend (ὀψώνια),
punctually given to the being which has joined its war
against the will of God, is death; but the free gift of
God is life eternal, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

"Is life worth living?" Yes, infinitely well worth,
for the living man who has surrendered to "the Lord
that bought him." Outside that ennobling captivity,
that invigorating while most genuine bondservice, the
life of man is at best complicated and tired with a
bewildered quest, and gives results at best abortive,
matched with the ideal purposes of such a being. We
"present ourselves to God," for His ends, as implements,
vassals, willing bondmen; and lo, our own end
is attained. Our life has settled, after its long friction,
into gear. Our root, after hopeless explorations in the
dust, has struck at last the stratum where the immortal
water makes all things live, and grow, and put forth fruit
for heaven. The heart, once dissipated between itself
and the world, is now "united" to the will, to the love,
of God; and understands itself, and the world, as never
before; and is able to deny self and to serve others
in a new and surprising freedom. The man, made
willing to be nothing but the tool and bondman of God,
"has his fruit" at last; bears the true product of his
now re-created being, pleasant to the Master's eye, and
fostered by His air and sun. And this "fruit" issues,
as acts issue in habit, in the glad experience of a life
really sanctified, really separated in ever deeper inward
reality, to a holy will. And the "end" of the whole
glad possession, is "life eternal."

Those great words here signify, surely, the coming
bliss of the sons of the resurrection, when at last
in their whole perfected being they will "live" all
through, with a joy and energy as inexhaustible as its
Fountain, and unencumbered at last and for ever by
the conditions of our mortality. To that vast future,
vast in its scope yet all concentrated round the fact
that "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is," the Apostle here looks onward. He will say
more of it, and more largely, later, in the eighth chapter.
But as with other themes so with this he preludes with
a few glorious chords the great strain soon to come.
He takes the Lord's slave by the hand, amidst his
present tasks and burthens, (dear tasks and burthens,
because the Master's, but still full of the conditions of
earth,) and he points upward—not to a coming manumission
in glory; the man would be dismayed to foresee
that; he wants to "serve for ever";—but to a scene
of service in which the last remainders of hindrance to
its action will be gone, and a perfected being will for
ever, perfectly, be not its own, and so will perfectly
live in God. And this, so he says to his fellow-servant,
to you and to me, is "the gift of God"; a grant as free,
as generous, as ever King gave vassal here below.
And it is to be enjoyed as such, by a being which,
living wholly for Him, will freely and purely exult to
live wholly on Him, in the heavenly places.

Yet surely the bearing of the sentences is not wholly
upon heaven. Life eternal, so to be developed hereafter
that Scripture speaks of it often as if it began hereafter,
really begins here, and develops here, and is already
"more abundant" (John x. 10) here. It is, as to its
secret and also its experience, to know and to enjoy God,
to be possessed by Him, and used for all His will. In
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this respect it is "the end," the issue and the goal, now and
perpetually, of the surrender of the soul. The Master
meets that attitude with more and yet more of Himself,
known, enjoyed, possessed, possessing. And so He gives,
evermore gives, out of His sovereign bounty, life eternal
to the bondservant who has embraced the fact that he
is nothing, and has nothing, outside his Master. Not
at the outset of the regenerate life only, and not only
when it issues into the heavenly ocean, but all along
the course, the life eternal is still "the free gift of God."
Let us now, to-day, to-morrow, and always, open the
lips of surrendering and obedient faith, and drink it in,
abundantly, and yet more abundantly. And let us use
it for the Giver.

We are already, here on earth, at its very springs; so
the Apostle reminds us. For it is "in Jesus Christ our
Lord"; and we, believing, are in Him, "saved in His
life." It is in Him; nay, it is He. "I am the Life"; "He
that hath the Son, hath the life." Abiding in Christ, we
live "because He liveth." It is not to be "attained";
it is given, it is our own. In Christ, it is given, in
its divine fulness, as to covenant provision, here, now,
from the first, to every Christian. In Christ, it is
supplied, as to its fulness and fitness for each arising
need, as the Christian asks, receives, and uses for his
Lord.

So from, or rather in, our holy bondservice the
Apostle has brought us to our inexhaustible life, and
its resources for willing holiness. But he has more to
say in explaining the beloved theme. He turns from
slave to wife, from surrender to bridal, from the
purchase to the vow, from the results of a holy
bondage to the offspring of a heavenly union. Hear
him as he proceeds:

Or do you not know, brethren, (for I am talking
(λαλῶ) to those acquainted with law, whether
Mosaic or Gentile,) that the law has claim on
the man, the party (ἄνθρωπος) in any given
case, for his whole lifetime? For the woman
with a husband (ἀνὴρ) is to her living husband
bound by law, stands all along bound (δέδεται) to
him. His life, under normal conditions, is his adequate
claim. Prove him living, and you prove her his. But
if the husband should have died, she stands ipso facto cancelled103103We render the bold phrase literally.
(κατήργηται) from the husband's law, the
marriage law as he could bring it to bear against her.
So, therefore, while the husband lives, she will
earn adulteress for her name, if she weds another
(ἑτέρῳ, "a second") husband. But if the husband should
have died, she is free from the law in question, so as to
be no adulteress, if wedded to another, a second, husband.
Accordingly, my brethren, you too, as a mystic
bride, collectively and individually,104104See 1 Cor. vi. 17.were done to death as to the Law, so slain that its capital claim
upon you is met and done, by means of the Body of the
Christ (τοῦ Χριστοῦ), by "the doing to death" of His
sacred Body for you, on His atoning Cross, to satisfy
for you the aggrieved Law; in order to your wedding
Another, a second Party (ἑτέρῳ), Him who rose from the
dead; that we might bear fruit for God; "we," Paul
and his converts, in one happy fellowship, which he
delights thus to remember and indicate by the way.

The parable is stated and explained with a clearness
which leaves us at first the more surprised that in the
application the illustration should be reversed. In
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the illustration, the husband dies, the woman lives,
and weds again. In the application, the Law does
not die, but we, its unfaithful bride, are "done to death
to it," and then, strange sequel, are wedded to the
Risen Christ. We are taken by Him to be "one
spirit" with Him (1 Cor. vi. 17). We are made one in
all His interests and wealth, and fruitful of a progeny
of holy deeds in this vital union. Shall we call all this
a simile confused? Not if we recognize the deliberate
and explicit carefulness of the whole passage. St Paul,
we may be sure, was quite as quick as we are to see
the inverted imagery. But he is dealing with a
subject which would be distorted by a mechanical
correspondence in the treatment. The Law cannot
die, for it is the preceptive will of God. Its claim is,
in its own awful forum domesticum, like the injured
Roman husband, to sentence its own unfaithful wife
to death. And so it does; so it has done. But
behold, its Maker and Master steps upon the scene.
He surrounds the guilty one with Himself, takes her
whole burthen on Himself, and meets and exhausts her
doom. He dies. He lives again, after death, because
of death; and the Law acclaims His resurrection as
infinitely just. He rises, clasping in His arms her
for whom He died, and who thus died in Him, and
now rises in Him. Out of His sovereign love, while
the Law attests the sure contract, and rejoices as "the
Bridegroom's Friend," He claims her—herself, yet in
Him another—for His blessed Bride.

All is love, as if we walked through the lily-gardens
of the holy Song, and heard the call of the turtle in
the vernal woods, and saw the King and His Beloved
rest and rejoice in one another. All is law, as if
we were admitted to watch some process of Roman
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matrimonial contract, stern and grave, in which every
right is scrupulously considered, and every claim
elaborately secured, without a smile, without an
embrace, before the magisterial chair. The Church,
the soul, is married to her Lord, who has died for
her, and in whom now she lives. The transaction is
infinitely happy. And it is absolutely right. All the
old terrifying claims are amply and for ever met. And
now the mighty, tender claims which take their place
instantly and of course begin to bind the Bride. The
Law has "given her away"—not to herself, but to the
Risen Lord.

For this, let us remember, is the point and bearing
of the passage. It puts before us, with its imagery at
once so grave and so benignant, not only the mystic
Bridal, but the Bridal as it is concerned with holiness.
The Apostle's object is altogether this. From one
side and from another he reminds us that we belong.
He has shewn us our redeemed selves in their blessed
bondservice; "free from sin, enslaved to God." He
now shews us to ourselves in our divine wedlock;
"married to Another," "bound to the law of" the
heavenly Husband; clasped to His heart, but also to
His rights, without which the very joy of marriage
would be only sin. From either parable the inference
is direct, powerful, and, when we have once seen the
face of the Master and of the Husband, unutterably
magnetic on the will. You are set free, into a liberty
as supreme and as happy as possible. You are appropriated,
into a possession, and into a union, more close
and absolute than language can set forth. You are
wedded to One who "has and holds from this time
forward." And the sacred bond is to be prolific of
results. A life of willing and loving obedience, in the
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power of the risen Bridegroom's life, is to have as it
were for its progeny the fair circle of active graces,
"love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness,
fidelity, meekness, self-control."

Alas, in the time of the old abolished wedlock there
was result, there was progeny. But that was the fruit
not of the union but of its violation. For when
we were in the flesh, in our unregenerate days,
when our rebel self,105105No word, for practical purposes, answers better than "self"
(as popularly used in Christian parlance) to the idea represented by
St Paul's use of the word σὰρξ in moral connexions.
the antithesis of "the Spirit," ruled
and denoted us, (a state, he implies, in which we all
were once, whatever our outward differences were,) the
passions, the strong but reasonless impulses, of our sins,
which passions were by means of the Law, occasioned
by the fact of its just but unloved claim, fretting the
self-life into action, worked actively in our limbs, in our
bodily life in its varied faculties and senses, so as to
bear fruit for death. We wandered, restive, from our
bridegroom, the Law, to Sin, our paramour. And
behold, a manifold result of evil deeds and habits, born
as it were into bondage in the house of Death. But
now, now as the wonderful case stands in the
grace of God, we are (it is the aorist, but our
English fairly represents it) abrogated from the Law,
divorced from our first injured Partner, nay, slain (in our
crucified Head) in satisfaction of its righteous claim, as
having died (ἀποθανόντες106106So read, not ἀποθανόντος. The textual evidence supports
ἀποθανόντες, and the evidence of the context is all for it. He has
elaborately avoided, in applying his illustration, the thought that
the Law can die. We die, in Christ, in judicial satisfaction of its most
righteous claim. It lives with us, it guides us, with the authority of
God. But it is now our monitor, not our avenger of blood.)
with regard to that in which
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we were held captive, even the Law and its violated
bond, so that we do bondservice in the Spirit's newness,
and not in the Letter's oldness.

Thus he comes back, through the imagery of wedlock,
to that other parable of slavery which has become so
precious to his heart. "So that we do bondservice,"
"so that we live a slave-life";
ὤστε δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς.
It is as if he must break in on the heavenly Marriage
itself with that brand and bond, not to disturb the joy
of the Bridegroom and the Bride, but to clasp to the
Bride's heart the vital fact that she is not her own;
that fact so blissful, but so powerful also and so practical
that it is worth anything to bring it home.

It is to be no dragging and dishonouring bondage,
in which the poor toiler looks wistfully out for the
sinking sun and the extended shadows. It is to be
"not in the Letter's oldness"; no longer on the old
principle of the dread and unrelieved "Thou shalt,"
cut with a pen of legal iron upon the stones of
Sinai; bearing no provision of enabling power, but all
possible provision of doom for the disloyal. It is to be
"in the Spirit's newness"; on the new, wonderful
principle, new in its full manifestation and application
in Christ, of the Holy Ghost's empowering presence.107107Such passages as this and its companion, 2 Cor. iii. 4-8, have
no reference, however remote, to the "letter and spirit" of Holy
Scripture. They contrast Sinai and Pentecost.
In that light and strength the new relations are discovered,
accepted, and fulfilled. Joined by the Spirit
to the Lord Christ, so as to have full benefit of His
justifying merit; filled by the Spirit with the Lord
Christ, so as to derive freely and always the blessed
virtues of His life; the willing bondservant finds in his
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absolute obligations an inward liberty ever "new,"
fresh as the dawn, pregnant as the spring. And
the worshipping Bride finds in the holy call to "keep
her only unto Him" who has died for her life,
nothing but a perpetual surprise of love and gladness,
"new every morning," as the Spirit shews her the
heart and the riches of her Lord.

Thus closes, in effect, the Apostle's reasoned exposition
of the self-surrender of the justified. Happy
the man who can respond to it all with the Amen of
a life which, reposing on the Righteousness of God,
answers ever to His Will with the loyal gladness
found in "the newness of the Spirit." It is "perfect
freedom" to understand, in experience, the bondage
and the bridal of the saints.

94It will be observed that we place the paragraph after ver. 13, not,
as many editions of the Epistle do, after ver. 14. It seems to us clear
that ver. 14 has a closer connexion with the following than with the
previous context. It looks back, not precisely to ver. 13, but to the
general recent argument, that it may then look definitely forward, over
new ground.

95Ὑπὸ νόμον, ὑπὸ χάριν:
the accusative case gives the preposition properly the meaning of
motion underwards. But this must not be pressed too far.

97Luther's Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter, has been often quoted as if
that great saint meant to argue licence from Justification by faith. "God
forbid." The words occur in a counsel to Melanchthon, whose anxious
conscience doubted whether it were not a sin to communicate in one
Kind, even where the true Rite in both Kinds could not be had. It
was Luther's glowing paradox, to drive a manifestly morbid and
weakening scrupulousness from his friend's mind. See Julius Hare's
Vindication of Luther, pp. 178, etc.

100We do not forget that many Christians feel a strong repugnance
to the use of this word, steeped as it is in associations of degradation
and wrong. For ourselves, we would yield to this feeling so far as
habitually to prefer the word of milder sound, "bondservant." But
surely in this passage the Apostle on purpose so accentuates the
thought of our bondservice that its fullest and sternest designation is
in place. And, if in any degree we gather the thought of other hearts
from our own, there are times and connexions in which the fulness of
the joy of service demands that designation in order to its adequate
realization.

101Μέλη: what "the body" is in such passages as xii. 1 that "the
limbs" are in detail.

105No word, for practical purposes, answers better than "self"
(as popularly used in Christian parlance) to the idea represented by
St Paul's use of the word σὰρξ in moral connexions.

106So read, not ἀποθανόντος. The textual evidence supports
ἀποθανόντες, and the evidence of the context is all for it. He has
elaborately avoided, in applying his illustration, the thought that
the Law can die. We die, in Christ, in judicial satisfaction of its most
righteous claim. It lives with us, it guides us, with the authority of
God. But it is now our monitor, not our avenger of blood.

107Such passages as this and its companion, 2 Cor. iii. 4-8, have
no reference, however remote, to the "letter and spirit" of Holy
Scripture. They contrast Sinai and Pentecost.